St. Olaf leads nation in student voting
‘I Voted’ stickers at a polling place in Apple Valley. Photo by Max Nesterak/Minnesota Reformer.
Welcome to The Topline, a weekly roundup of the big numbers driving the Minnesota news cycle, as well as the smaller ones that you might have missed. This week: The nation’s highest student voter turnout; the issues Americans are Googling; a surge in Spanish-language drivers license exams; the fundraising machine; and Halloween Blizzard season.
St. Olaf students top nation in voter turnout
St. Olaf college announced this month that 90% of students were registered to vote and 67% participated in the 2022 midterm elections, the highest voting rate of any college or university in the nation.
The numbers were compiled as part of the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge, a nonpartisan effort to boost voter turnout among college students.
It’s the second election cycle in a row that St. Olaf students have topped the group’s participation rankings.
Secretary of State Steve Simon recognized the college’s efforts at an event last week, according to MPR News. “We want maximum participation period, whether folks are old or young, students or not,” Simon said.
That recognition and encouragement stands in stark contrast to efforts in many other states, most of them Republican controlled, to make it harder for students to vote. Many of those efforts stem from cynical efforts by former president Donald Trump and his allies to undermine confidence in elections and stoke misguided fears about “voter fraud,” which is vanishingly rare.
What people look for during election years
Data artist Moritz Stefaner recently released a fun, impressionistic project called Waves of Interest. It’s an exploration of state-level Google search interest in various election issues — crime, taxes, inflation, etc. — over the years.
Rather than the precisely delineated map borders you usually see in efforts like this, the abstracted visuals treat the numbers assigned to states more like contours on an elevation map. You lose a lot of precision this way but the resulting effect is unfamiliar enough to make you stop and ponder.
Overall the issues that have seen the greatest increases in interest relative to 2020 include inflation, pension funding, terrorism and energy. On the other hand, interest is waning in topics like student loans, unemployment, racism and fact-checking.
Requests for Spanish language driver’s license exams up 500%
MPR News reports that there have been more than 110,000 requests for driver’s license exams written in Spanish following the passage of the Driver’s License for All law, which allows immigrants to apply for licenses regardless of their legal status.
Those requests are up 500% from previous years, according to the Department of Public Safety, a sign that there’s high demand for licenses among the undocumented community.
In states lacking such laws many undocumented immigrants drive without licenses in order to get to work, go to school, and do other necessary errands. Making licenses available has led to reductions in car accidents, alcohol-related crashes and uninsured driving in the states that have already done it.
Outside DFL groups have major fundraising advantage
MinnPost’s Peter Callaghan covers September’s campaign finance data, which shows that DFL groups are outraising and outspending their Republican counterparts this cycle.
“The state DFL is outraising the state GOP; the DFL legislative caucuses are outraising the GOP caucuses; labor is outraising business; progressive PACs are outraising conservative PACs,” Callaghan writes.
The top DFL group so far, the Alliance for a Better Minnesota State PAC, has brought in more than $2.8 million this cycle. The top GOP group has raised less than one-third of that.
The disparity between party committees is even greater, with the DFL Central Committee bringing in $6.8 million compared to the GOP’s $339,000, a 20-to-1 difference.
Halloween Blizzard season comes earlier every year
It’s almost October, which means Minnesotans are about to start fondly reminiscing about the Halloween Blizzard of 1991 and asking every newcomer to the state whether they’ve heard of it.
You can actually quantify this tendency using Google Trends data, which show that interest in the blizzard spikes every year around October. This chart, for instance, shows past-year searches in Minnesota related to the Halloween Blizzard. See that little uptick all the way to the right? That’s from your local blizzard enthusiasts firing up the Google machine in search of fun facts and tidbits to reminisce over.
This chart takes the longer view, all the way back to 2004, and suggests that interest in the blizzard has been growing over the past two decades. Perhaps like the proverbial fish tale, the Halloween Blizzard gets bigger with each retelling.
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